Ichi Ni San Shi

Ichi Ni San Shi — with Ichi Ni San Shi, Bill Jeffery, Jonathan F Horne, Sheila Scoville and Amanda Jones 


http://ichinisanshi1234.tumblr.com/

The night started with Ichi Ni San Shi setting up on stage. They quickly became one of my favorite local bands earlier this year upon hearing their album Slow Truth and refusing to play it on anything but repeat thereafter, and winning me over with their live performance. Bill Jeffrey’s energy onstage is completely infectious — he certainly knows how to keep a crowd entertained, either with his dance grooves or with his light-spirited banter in between songs. With a new album in the works, I was pleased to hear them play a new track, ‘Setting Traps’, which gives me entirely high hopes for what’s yet to come with Ichi Ni San Shi.

Who knew? About.com reviews punk shows. (Guess we’re sort of punk in a winging-it-as-we-go-along way.) A nice review by Ryan Cooper of our SXSW show this year:

The best part of SXSW is the surprises, those bands you just stumble upon when you’re not sure what you’re looking for, or those that happen to be playing with the bands that you thought you really wanted to see.
This was the case with Austin's Ichi Ni San Shi.
We had wandered down to Beerland for the Super Secret / Twistworthy / Thread Pull Records unofficial SXSW show to see Ghost Knife, another project by Mike Wiebe of the Riverboat Gamblersand High Tension Wires. We weren’t going to be able to see either of his more prominent projects (the only Gamblers show I saw listed happened Saturday - after we left Texas), but he’s one of the most exciting frontmen around, so I’m always interested to see what he has to offer.
But first up was the hard to pronounce and harder to figure out Ichi Ni San Shi.
Let me start out by letting you know how much I didn’t like this band. The vocals were nasal and grating, and the music, this mashup of electronic rhythms, pop melodies and horns that didn’t seem to quite match up all seemed unlistenable and impossible to appreciate - the sort of music created for people to have a favorite band that nobody else is into, because they’re impossible to get into.
But sitting on the bar stool drinking a cold tall boy, and transformation began to take place. I’m not sure if it was an evolution in the band’s set, or a mental shift in the way I was listening to it, but I started to hear the music.
I started to catch the cleverness in the band’s sound, to detect that these seemingly discordant rhythms matched up in a less than traditional way. And it wasn’t pretentious and it wasn’t artsy; nothing seemed placed or planned in an effort to make them seem like they were doing anything more than making the music they wanted to make. I even began to warm up to vocalist Bill Jeffrey’s voice. He began to mesh perfectly with the music, serving as another instrument in a complex musical composition.
By the time the band played the song “Watch Them Grow,” I had grown from strongly disliking this band to actually becoming an avid fan, making a mental note to seek out their recordings. And that track - “Watch Them Grow” is an infectious earworm that I would be humming and singing to myself for days afterword.
And I’m doing it again now.